XTZ Inflation Analysis · July 2026 · Supply growing, projected to keep growing
Tezos adds about 8.87M XTZ to the market every 90 days, and essentially all of it is one thing: validator rewards minted under adaptive issuance, a rate the Tezos protocol resets every cycle and which has fallen from 3.67% a year ago to 3.165% today. Against that, storage-fee burns and coins sent to the Tezos burn address remove only 97.6K XTZ — about one percent of the mint — leaving the framework at +0.80% net, against our supply monitor at +0.90%. XTZ is uncapped, so nothing ever ends the emission; what limits it is the adaptive issuance curve itself, which keeps pushing the rate down as staking grows.
The verdict, in one paragraph
For the 90-day window ending July 20 2026, the MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads XTZ at +0.80% net. Sell pressure totals 8.87M XTZ and buy pressure 97.6K XTZ, against a circulating base of 1,091.16M XTZ. Our supply monitor reads the realized last-90-day change at +0.90%, a gap of about 0.10 percentage points — comfortably inside tolerance, so no monitor-gap chip ships on the Tezos overview. The reconciliation is unusually tight because Tezos publishes its own issuance rate on-chain and the chain's coinbase counter can be measured against it: the rate parameter averaged 3.241% across the window while the measured mint annualised to 3.250%, a difference of 0.009 percentage points. Tezos is best characterized as a quiet, uncapped proof-of-stake chain whose inflation is falling by design.
Sell pressure: where new XTZ comes from
Sell #1, protocol inflation, is 8.83M XTZ over 90 days and is effectively the entire Tezos sell ledger. Tezos has no block subsidy schedule and no halving. Instead it runs adaptive issuance: every cycle the protocol recomputes the yearly rate at which it mints baker and staker rewards, moving it toward whatever level should pull half of all XTZ into staking. Only 30.2% is staked today — 335.73M XTZ across bakers and their stakers — which sits far under the 50% target, yet the rate has still been falling steadily: 3.67% measured over the trailing year, 3.404% over 180 days, 3.317% as the on-chain parameter three months ago, and 3.165% now. Because a single published issuance figure for Tezos goes stale within weeks, this reading does not trust one number: the rate parameter was read at three separate block heights and independently measured off the chain's own coinbase counter over four window lengths, and the two agree to within a hundredth of a percentage point. Applying the current 3.165% forward gives 8.67M XTZ over the next 90 days.
Sell #2, vesting unlocks, is zero. The 2017 Tezos fundraiser distributed XTZ with no lock-up at all, and the four-year vesting streams that covered the Tezos Foundation and the original development company finished in September 2022. There is no forward unlock calendar for XTZ on any vesting tracker, and none was found this session. Sell #3, Foundation and unscheduled unlocks, is 36.8K XTZ — small, but genuinely observed rather than assumed. About 19.99M XTZ of 2017 fundraiser allocations were never claimed on-chain, and the activation counter advanced by 36,803 XTZ inside this window as a few of those holders finally claimed. That flow is sporadic rather than scheduled: it moved nothing at all in the last month and nothing between March and April, so the framework projects zero forward rather than averaging it. Sell #4, long-term locked or bankruptcy, is zero — there is no Tezos estate and no court-ordered distribution.
Buy pressure: where new XTZ goes
Buy #1, programmatic buyback, is zero. Tezos runs no buyback of any kind, and the framework rejected the only material suggesting otherwise — posts advertising a Tezos buyback-and-burn programme that appear under an unaffiliated author on no official Tezos surface. Buy #2, protocol fee burn, is 97.6K XTZ, and it comes from two permanent removals that the Tezos chain counts separately. The first is the storage fee: writing data to Tezos costs 250 mutez per byte, and that payment is destroyed rather than routed to a validator, which removed 20,225 XTZ over the window. The second is voluntary — 77,397 XTZ was sent to the Tezos burn address by holders. A single large send in May 2026 dominates that figure, so the forward burn is set at the trailing one-month rate of 32.4K XTZ rather than repeating the window total. Either way the burn is roughly one percent of what Tezos mints, and it does not meaningfully offset issuance.
Buy #3, Foundation buy, is zero: the Tezos Foundation has disclosed no open-market XTZ purchases, and its one 2026 announcement on the subject concerned delegating part of its existing holding to a treasury company's validators — delegation, not a purchase, and outside this window in any case. Buy #4, new long-term lock, is zero. Staking on Tezos holds 335.73M XTZ, but unstaking finalizes in three cycles of one day each, so staked XTZ clears back to liquid in three to four days. The framework does not treat a three-day unbond as a lock, and no new lock-up contract was announced.
Foundation and overhang
Two team-controlled overhangs sit behind the Tezos float. The first is on-chain and exactly measurable: 19.99M XTZ of 2017 fundraiser commitments that were never activated, the difference between the 1,111.14M XTZ the Tezos chain has created and the 1,091.16M XTZ counted as circulating. Nine years on, this pool drips out in occasional small claims with no schedule and no controlling entity, and it is read off the chain's activation counter at every rebuild. The second is the Tezos Foundation endowment, and it is opaque: the Foundation has never published its XTZ holding as a coin quantity, and the newest attributable figure is a $181.5M valuation at the end of 2024, with no 2026 activity report published as of Jul 21 2026. That balance is already classified inside the circulating float, so a Foundation sale would not move the supply counter — it would move the market. If either overhang's balance falls between checks, the outflow enters Sell #3 at the next check.
How XTZ compares to other uncapped proof-of-stake chains
The right comparison for XTZ is not a hard-capped chain but the family of uncapped proof-of-stake layer-1s that mint validator rewards forever. Within that family Tezos is unusual in two mechanical ways. First, its issuance rate is not a fixed constant nor a hand-tuned governance parameter — adaptive issuance recomputes it every cycle as a function of how much XTZ is staked, which means the rate falls automatically as staking adoption rises, without a vote. Second, the curve is bounded in protocol: a floor of 0.25% and a ceiling of 10%, with a 50% staked-ratio target and a two-percent dead band. That gives Tezos something most uncapped chains lack — a known worst case for issuance that no discretionary decision can exceed.
The trade-off is on the buy side. Uncapped chains that pair continuous emission with a large fee burn can run net deflationary when activity is high; Tezos cannot, because its burn is tied to storage rather than to transaction volume, and at 97.6K XTZ per 90 days it is around one percent of the mint. Chains with a hard cap and a halving schedule offer the opposite profile: their issuance is fixed and falls in steps regardless of participation, but it also cannot respond when security spending needs to change. Tezos sits between the two — a supply that grows every single quarter, but at a rate that has declined in every measurement window this year, and that the protocol itself is steering downward. Against the wider uncapped cohort, +0.80% per 90 days is a low, orderly number.
What to watch in the next 90 days
The first thing to watch is the staked ratio. At 30.2% it is the single input that sets the Tezos issuance rate, and every point it climbs toward the 50% target pushes the rate lower — the whole 3.67%-to-3.165% decline this year is that mechanism working. The second is the next Tezos protocol amendment: Ushuaia activated on mainnet on Jun 30 2026 and left reward and burn rules untouched, but it shipped enshrined liquid staking and quantum-resistant keys behind a testnet flag, and the amendment that turns those on would change how easily XTZ moves in and out of staking. Third, watch for a Tezos Foundation activity report covering 2026, which would be the first XTZ treasury disclosure since the end of 2024 and the only way to size that overhang properly. Fourth, watch Tezos X, still targeted for summer 2026 with no on-chain vote yet; nothing published attributes any supply change to it. Fifth, watch whether the fundraiser-activation counter resumes — it has been flat for a month.
Summary
The MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads Tezos at +0.80% net over the last 90 days and +0.79% projected forward, with our supply monitor at +0.90% — a clean match. The structural mechanism is adaptive issuance: XTZ has no cap and no halving, and every new coin is a validator reward minted at a rate the Tezos protocol recalculates each cycle, currently 3.165% a year and falling as staking grows. The key risk is that the buy side is negligible — a storage-fee burn of 97.6K XTZ per 90 days against 8.83M minted, with no buyback and no Foundation buying to offset it, so XTZ has no route to net deflation. The ceiling that matters is not a supply cap, because there is none; it is the protocol's own issuance bound of 10% and, far more relevantly, the 0.25% floor the curve is heading toward.
MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of XTZ, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Updated Jul 21 2026.